Our very own Janet D. Thomson was announced as the winner of the 2022 Anna Mae Hanson Award at the annual Montana State Genealogical Society Conference at Fairmont Hot Springs this past weekend. It is given by the State Society in acknowledgement for dedicated service in the genealogical community.
Anna Mae Hanson was a member of the Broken Mountain Genealogical Society. She was also one of the founding members of the State Society and served as MSGS Historian until her death in the mid-1990s. It was decided to give an award in her name annually at the State Conference to a genealogist who gives dedicated service to the genealogical community, just as Ms. Hanson did.
Nomination:
Janet Thomson has been a member of the Great Falls Genealogy Society since 1999. She has served as President, Vice-President, and Secretary on the Executive Board. Jan has also helped in the publishing of our two publications – The GFGS Newsletter (The Falls Newsletter) and Treasure State Lines.
During her membership, Jan has also been on the Acquisition Committee of GFGS. Jan is always looking for new books and new resources to recommend to the library. These isn’t a book in our library that Jan has not touched. She has been the main member responsible for the arrangement of the library. Jan has also served as a librarian for GFGS for over 20 years. During that time, she has easily averaged at least 10 hours a week in that capacity.
Jan has taught genealogy classes and conducted webinars for GFGS for decades. Currently, Wednesdays at 11 is her current webinar series. These webinars are offered to all members of MSGS for free. With the easing of COVID restrictions, she will be starting the in-person classes up again. She is willing to help any patron that comes to the library on how to research genealogy. She has also conducted RootsMagic and DNA Special Interest Groups. Jan has also delivered genealogy-oriented talks to groups in order to expand that group’s knowledge of history and genealogy. Jan is conducting a webinar for FamilyTreeWebinars on Montana’s genealogy resources in July 2022.
Jan has prepared hundreds of indexes for books, records, and newspapers that are in our library. She calls that her relaxation or play time. She has worked on our projects committee for all of her membership. Jan has assisted with our two main inventory projects, Cascade County records and Ursuline Archive records. Doing this means recording the record (what it is, what it looks like and where it is). Both of these inventories were done over a year.
